The world-renowned English chemist William Ramsay has discovered a method of directly extracting gas from coal seams. Ramsay is already conducting negotiations with one coal mine owner regarding the practical implementation of the process.

One of the great tasks of modern technique is thus approaching resolution. The revolution that its solution will provoke is enormous.

At present, in order to utilize the energy contained in coal, it is transported throughout the country and burned in a multitude of separate enterprises and homes.

Ramsay's discovery signifies a gigantic technical revolution in this, perhaps the most important, branch of production in capitalist countries.

Ramsay discovered a method of directly transforming coal into gas at the site of its location, without extracting it to the surface of the earth. A similar procedure, only considerably simpler, is sometimes employed in salt mining: salt is not extracted to the surface of the earth directly, but is dissolved in water, and the brine is then pumped up through pipes.

Ramsay's method transforms coal mines as it were into immense distillation apparatus for the production of gas. Gas drives gas engines, which make it possible to utilize twice as large a portion of the energy contained in coal than was the case with steam engines. Gas engines, in turn, serve to convert energy into electricity, which technique is already now able to transmit over enormous distances.

The cost of electrical current would be reduced, in such a technical revolution, to one fifth, and perhaps even to one tenth of the present cost. An enormous amount of human labor, now expended on the extraction and transportation of coal, would be saved. One could even utilize the poorest and currently undeveloped coal deposits. Expenditures on lighting and heating of homes would be reduced extraordinarily.

The revolution in industry provoked by this discovery will be tremendous.

But the consequences of this revolution for all social life under the present capitalist system will be entirely different from those this discovery would provoke under socialism.

Under capitalism, the "liberation" of the labor of millions of coal miners engaged in coal extraction will inevitably generate mass unemployment, an enormous growth of destitution, a worsening of the workers' position. And the profit from the great invention will go into the pockets of the Morgans, Rockefellers, Ryabushiuskys, Morozovs—and their retinue of lawyers, directors, professors, and other lackeys of capital.

Under socialism, the application of Ramsay's method, "liberating" the labor of millions of coal miners, etc., would immediately make it possible to reduce the working day for all workers from, say, 8 hours to 7, or even less. The "electrification" of all factories and railways would make working conditions more hygienic, would free millions of workers from smoke, dust, and dirt, would accelerate the transformation of filthy abominable workshops into clean, bright laboratories worthy of human beings. Electric lighting and electric heating in every home would free millions of "domestic slaves" from the necessity of squandering three quarters of their lives in a fetid kitchen.

The technique of capitalism with each passing day increasingly outgrows those social conditions which doom the toiling masses to wage slavery.

*Pravda* No. 91, April 21, 1913. Signature: I.

Printed from the text of the newspaper *Pravda*